Robert Moor's 'On Trails: An Exploration' opens as an Appalachian Trail memoir and rapidly becomes something harder to categorize: a cross-disciplinary investigation into how trails form, who makes them, and what they reveal about intelligence, civilization, and movement itself.
The book moves from thru-hiking anecdote into biology, history, and philosophy. That pivot is the point. Readers expecting PCT nostalgia will get something with more structural ambition and a longer argument.
The case for reading the full review: it maps exactly where Moor's scope expands and whether the book earns its reach, which is the only question that matters for a work this wide.
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